America the Corrupt

Some years ago at a symposium at Oxford University, I listened to Sir Alfred Sherman, one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher, describe America as a deeply corrupt nation. At the time, I wondered how this very British gentleman, a brilliant thinker on the state of the world, could justify that statement. After all, it was well known that fraud and under-the-table payoffs were endemic to certain Asian countries, and African nations. It was simply the way that one did business in such places. But America? The “city on the hill”? The bastion of Judeo-Christianity, this exemplar of free democracy and free enterprise, “deeply corrupted”? Surely Sir Alfred should have chosen his words more carefully!

Well, a decade or so later, Sir Alfred’s words are ringing in my ears.

Tip of an Iceberg

It seems that each week, sometimes even day by day in any given week, we see yet another case of corporate, financial or government fraud in America.

In July, Economist.com ran a headline, “A Tangled Web,” with the quip, “A huge corruption investigation leads to a string of arrests in New Jersey.” Following an intensive 10-year investigation, the fbi and irs unveiled a huge money-laundering operation that extended from the streets of New Jersey and New York across the Atlantic into the Middle East. The great surprise to those uninitiated in the ways of 21st-century America was the societal ranking of those involved: “A mayor, a rabbi and an organ trafficker sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But the mayors of the New Jersey cities of Hoboken, Secaucus and Ridgefield, a council president, two state assemblymen, numerous other public officials and political operatives, and five rabbis are not laughing. They are among 44 people charged in criminal complaints filed on Thursday, July 23. The arrests were part of a 10-year federal investigation of both public corruption and an international money-laundering conspiracy. And, indeed, some organ selling” (July 24).

The problem is, this one example is but the tip of an iceberg, below which floats a huge, deeply entrenched, perverse way of life that has become endemic to American society. It’s a disease that has penetrated from the mansions of Beverly Hills to the trailer parks and ultimately the cardboard boxes and filthy dens of the street people of inner cities.

To be sure, in the English-speaking world, graft, fraud and corruption are not restricted to America only. Publicized earlier this year in the United Kingdom was the revelation of that nation’s most senior public servants’ exposure in fraudulent use of public monies through false and extraneous expense claims. What is different in America is the sheer size, scope and depth of the problem, which has now reached epidemic proportions. It’s part of the whole system—politically, economically, commercially, industrially—in health and education and the arts. No segment of American society remains untouched by this deep-seated sickness.

Most educated people are aware of the famously corrupt Democrats of Tammany Hall. But that is part of pre-fdr, New Deal, early-20th-century American history. What Sir Alfred Sherman was commenting on was the sheer plumbless depth of fraud and corruption in American society—corruption that had become so entrenched by the closing years of the 20th century that it has since led to an explosion of record-breaking cases of corporate fraud.

A Failure of Education

The intriguing aspect of this is that the whole unsavory mess triggered by the subprime loans and financial derivatives fiascoes of the past two years occurred on the beat of the new generation of mbas that had flooded into business, commerce and banking, not to mention Wall Street, over the previous decade or so.

What was the moral compass of this great pool of bright young things and their mentors of a generation or two earlier?

Well, the majority of the oldest of their teachers graduated from the years of a godless evolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, liberal-socialist thinking, Dr. Spock-style child-rearing, peacenik, antiwar street-rebelling, civil-rights-asserting, law-breaking, gender-bending, “no absolutes” amoral pseudo-philosophizing, pot-smoking academia possessing little or no moral backbone. Little wonder that the products of that academic sausage machine have turned out the least moral generation of businessmen, bankers, financiers and assorted snake-oil merchants within both commerce and government in recent Anglo-Saxon history.

It’s simply a case of cause and effect. The numerous failed and fraudulent financiers, brokers, bankers and merchants of the day are but the products of their education.

Corruption in Oversight

Stock-selling scandals on Wall Street led to the crash of 1929. In the 1930s, the U.S. government enacted new securities laws and brought into being the Securities and Exchange Commission (sec) to oversee them so as to prevent the exploitation of the public by securities fraud.

The problem was that when an amoral generation both entered business and penetrated the sec, it gained “a solid failing grade in terms of its oversight of stock exchanges and related market institutions. The sec simply looked aside when it came to an ever increasing flood of Wall Street frauds of the 1980s and 1990s” (Bob Jensen, History of Fraud in America).

Jensen points out that “The high-water mark of frauds came in the 1990s when the media finally got wind of ‘infectious greed’ in investment banking, stock trading, bond rating, mutual fund, and other industries rooted on Wall Street.”

Bob Jensen points to the condemning case made by Frank Partnoy in his book Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader, in which Partnoy “shows how corporations gradually increased financial risk and lost control of … overly complex … financing deals that obscured the losses and disguised frauds [and] pushed corporate officers and their boards into successive and ingenious deceptions. Major corporations such as Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom entered into enormous illegal corporate finance and accounting” (ibid.).

Perhaps most frightening of all to the American public are the more recent revelations of the fraud and corruption that is exhibited in the backgrounds of many an appointee to influential office in the team assembled to govern the country following America’s last presidential election.

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin has published a masterful expose of the “culture of corruption” rife in Washington in her explosive best-selling book by that name. She claims that corruption in government stretches across “wealthy power brokers … ethically challenged, bailout-bungling money men,” to “crime-coddling lawyers.” Malkin renders a mind-boggling case-by-case liturgy of lying, deceit, deep-seated corruption and fraud in the backgrounds of many who now hold senior office within the upper echelons of this government.

The Acorn Scandal

Also of deep concern is the dodging and weaving of President Obama on the question of his long-term association with the corrupt left-wing community organization acorn, with which he had a long-term link as a community organizer and legal adviser.

The Republican congressional website reports, “acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, touts itself as being the nation’s largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families. But the corrupted organization and loyal Democrat ally has proven itself once again to be a mere front for groups to undermine democracy, the economy and civility—all at the expense of the U.S. taxpayers. The activist group became infamous last year when it was investigated for voter registration fraud in 15 states. To date, some 70 acorn workers have been convicted for voter fraud registration.”

In September, a series of scandalous videos were released. A man and woman posing as a pimp and a prostitute solicited help from acorn officials in its Baltimore, Maryland; Brooklyn, New York; Washington, d.c., and San Bernardino and San Diego, California, offices. acorn employees readily advised the “pimp” on how to get a housing loan, launder money, and falsify tax documents for a proposed brothel that would employ underage girls smuggled into the U.S. from a foreign country.

acorn fired the employees, and Congress overwhelmingly voted to cut off the organization’s federal funding—which amounted to a potential $8.5 billion in stimulus money. Remarkably, however, the electrifying story was almost absent from mainstream news sources. When President Obama appeared on five Sunday morning news shows, only one interviewer brought the subject up. “Frankly, it’s not something I’ve followed closely,” the president claimed. “Mr. Obama took great pains to act as if he barely knew about acorn. In fact, his association goes back almost 20 years” (Wall Street Journal, September 21).

This smells somewhat of the odor surrounding the president’s 20-year association with a certain racially radical minister of religion. And the result may well be the same. Just as Barack Obama dumped his former spiritual guide of two decades, he now appears to be about to do the same with the singular enterprise that he once described in the most glowing terms as directly associated with his own career development. “In 2007, in a speech to acorn’s leaders prior to their political arm’s endorsement of his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was effusive: ‘I’ve been fighting alongside of acorn on issues you care about my entire career. [W]e appreciate your work’” (ibid.).

Moral equivalency plainly denigrates the institution of the American presidency. Sadly, it appears to be the foundation upon which the current administration is built.

Found Wanting

America is sick at its heart.

Terminal moral disease eats at its vitals from the very top of its government machine to the common drug pushers on its decaying city streets.

This is a nation for whom the writing is on the wall. Like the ancient kingdom of King Nebuchadnezzar, America is “weighed in the balances and … found wanting” (Daniel 5:27).

Just as the great Creator powerfully corrected the haughty king of Babylon, so Bible prophecy declares that the Anglo-Saxon nations, led by example by the Babylon of America, are destined to be profoundly corrected for their fraudulent, corrupting ways.

The time for the Anglo-Saxons to give account for their deeply entrenched sins is close at hand. And the means of that correction, to be rendered by Almighty God, is going to be a great shock to the self-indulgent, hedonistic American and British peoples. Believe it or not, it will be delivered to them by a third round of warfare instigated by the very same nation that triggered the last two world wars!

To the uneducated in biblical revelation, this may sound completely off the planet. Yet it is as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise.

You need to educate yourself in the reasons why the once greatest single nation on Earth has sunk to the level of the most fraudulent and corrupt. It is becoming an extremely urgent need for as many people as possible to be warned of the consequences of this Anglo-Saxon slide into the pit of moral depravity, deep-seated fraud and endemic corruption.

Request a free copy of our booklet Lamentations: The Point of No Return. If ever there was a book written for our time today, it is this book. You need to at least be acquainted with its message, even if you do not agree with it at this moment. For the chances are, you will recall and agree with its message when the prophecies that it contains are fulfilled, most dramatically, in the very near future!